[LBo] Permanent /home partition

[Randy Kramer]

On Saturday 03 June 2006 05:38 pm, Anita Lewis wrote:
> On 06/03/2006 05:05 PM Jisao wrote:
> > how
> > does having many distributions on a computer affect a /home partition
> > (common to all) when it comes to the configuration files (.files in
> > /home)?  I will end up with:  debian, kanotix rc15, kanotix 2005-3,
> > Suse and Ubuntu.
>
> This can be problematic, because the configuration files are different
> for different versions sometimes.  I've had problems and do not
> recommend using the same home, especially for this wide variety of
> distros.  Stefan has previously suggested using a common document
> partition instead.  You would be able to mount it as
> /home/user/documents, for example, in each distro.  I think you might
> need to make the user have the same id number on each one in order to be
> able to fully access the documents in each distro.
>
> Another possibility is to use the same /home but make a different user
> for each distro.  I think that sort of defeats the purpose you have in
> mind, though, of using the same documents in each and most likely the
> same mail.  The mail and bookmarks would probably be things I'd want to
> get at.  Using a common document partition for that would be better.
> I'd probably set my mail to be deposited in a directory on that
> partition or set a link to a common mail directory.  I'd use the same
> mail program on each distro.

I just wanted to jump on the bandwagon here and use it to make a further 
point--I think Linux makes a mistake by combining the user's configuration 
files and the user's data files in the same directory (/home/user).

I've tried to make this point to some people that I consider more 
advanced/experienced users, but they (or at least one in particular) 
disagreed.

IMHO, each user should have two directories to serve these two different 
purposes (I've played around with naming them, but the naming doesn't matter 
too much unless you're trying to minimize disruption to the current 
approach).  I'd just like to broach this idea here hoping that some day 
enough people will agree and there will be two separate directories.

When that happens, you keep your data in the appropriate directory and (in the 
case described here, of running multiple distros), share that directory with 
all distros.  Put your configuration data in the other directory, but have 
one of those for each distro.  (Agreed, in many cases the configuration will 
be the same across all those distros, but there will be cases where you want 
it to differ, or it needs to, ow whatever.  By having a configuration 
directory (per user) for each distro, you have the infrastructure to deal 
with that.

Randy Kramer

PS: In my case, I leave the configuration data in /home/<user> and put my data 
elsewhere (a top level directory labeled <user>).  I have to reconfigure a 
lot of my applications to look for my (user) data in that other directory.  
In some cases I use links in /home/<user> to point to files in /<user>.  (For 
example, I point /home/<user>/Mail to /<user>/mail.)  In some cases, every 
time I start an application, the first time I load a file I have to 
"manually" redirect it to the proper directory.

Things could be better.